[as if in dreams] a Newsletter from Joseph Zitt - 14 October 2023
I head out for the House of a Hundred Grandmothers at about 5 PM, as I usually do on Shabbat. The street and park are quiet. If I had stayed off media for the day, as the Orthodox do, I wouldn't have known that we were at war. Of course, I wouldn't have known last Shabbat either, except for that one early morning rocket alarm when the country was first attacked.
A few residents are sitting in the smaller park just outside the House. The man who brings the bread is alone on a bench, listening to music on his phone. We wish each other a "Shabbat shalom" as I pass.
Another resident sits closer to the house. I used to see her outdoors on most Shabbat afternoons, but she had been gone for a while. I'm told she had had COVID, and had been in the continuous care area. She now uses a rollator for walking. She calls out to me and asks how I am.
"I'm OK," I reply. "How are you?"
She smiles and shrugs. "As you say, 'No news is good news.'" She says that last part in English.
The front door is locked when I come up to it, as it has been since the start of the war. I ring the doorbell. I now know to do so. Last time I was there, it took me a while to translate the sign that says "The entrance is locked" and the handwritten one with an arrow under the words "Ring the bell."
The worker at the front desk lets me in and waves as I pass him, as does a caregiver in the lobby whose client sits next to her in a wheelchair.
As I walk past the courtyard, the manager who had come to my family's apartment on Wednesday calls out to me in English. She wants to know if the grandfather is back. He is.
I come upstairs and get caught up on family news. The relative who had volunteered to return to the army is now deployed in the North. He makes sure to call his daughter every evening. The mother has recovered from her illness. She sends the family photos of her daughter frolicking at the seaside. A caption: "Very calm sea. Very quiet. No sirens. Just jets."
The grandmother has been following reports of the war in the media, including local papers from places where our family lives in the States. She wants to know why their local papers' websites are barely mentioning the war.
I explain to her how local journalism has been gutted since she left the States. Local papers, from what I see, have to stretch to cover even school board meetings and the police blotter. I tell her that the New York Times (as I'm checking it now) has war news on the entire top screen of its home page, including the lead story, a large video carousel, and seven other stories, most of which have thumbnail photographs next to the headlines.
I stay a little later than usual. Just as I'm going to leave, the grandfather emerges from his porch, where he has been doing the afternoon and evening prayers. Sunset has been getting earlier. For the first time in months, I'm there as the Sabbath ends.
We gather around the kitchen table for the Havdalah ceremony. He fills a cup with grape juice, including the ritually-required amount of actual wine, up to the brim. A saucer beneath it and a napkin next to it are ready to catch the inevitable spills. He arranges the other items. Since open flames are not allowed in the apartments, he lights an electronic candle.
He recites brief verses from the Bible and several blessings. We repeat one of the verses together. He and I drink the wine. The grandmother would, but she is ferociously allergic to grapes. Some of it drips on my shirt, but I don't mind. I have learned to wear black or wine-colored t-shirts for Havdalah.
All of us, including the Christian caregiver, wave our hands over the candle, as if performing a first non-Sabbath-like action by examining our fingernails. He crushes some spices in a cup and passes it around for us to breathe in their scent. I take a deep breath and hold the scent for as long as I can, as if bogarting a joint.
I head home after the ceremony, waving goodbye to the worker at the front desk as I leave. It's dark, and few people remain outside. Several cats patrol the street between the House and my apartment.
I check the liveblogs when I get in. There have been more sirens just south of here. One rocket has landed in the town where I used to get off the train for the Scratch Orchestra rehearsals. No one was hurt.
I eat a quick supper and start to put my laundry together to get picked up in the morning.
I hear rain start. It's good. We need rain. But I find myself worrying about the mass of people rushing within Gaza to the area south of the wadi. Rain will make their travel more difficult, though they do need water.
Visiting the House also reminds me that the most fragile people in a community would be the least able to flee from it. The people I have come to know using wheelchairs, needing electricity for their oxygen, or dealing with dementia would effectively be trapped wherever they are. I fear for those in hospitals and other such places in cities in which fighting will erupt. I have to trust that our government will do its best to avoid assaulting the innocent, but doing its best may not be enough to save them.
The rain stops, then starts again, with thunder this time. I continue to put my laundry together. I wrestle with the duvet cover. With the help of YouTube, I'm getting better at that. I lay a towel on top of the laundry before I tie up the bag. It won't be much help in keeping the laundry dry, but it's all I can do.
Colophon
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Here’s an archive of past newsletters.
The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me there, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)
You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter.
Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.
L'hitraot.